Is that How Everyone Really Feels? Emotional
Contagion with Masking for Virtual Crowds

Abstract

Many simulations use emotional contagion to simulate how
groups of humans behave in emotionally charged environments. These models
either have each individual agent conform to a group emotion, or have
emotional spirals. However, these models do not include well known
phenomenon such as displaying and receiving emotions through different
means of communication, or having emotions masked by an
agent's desired display emotion. We create a model of emotional contagion
that considers multiple channels to communicate on. We also provide a
method for agents to mask their emotions, which is used to control the
spread of contagion between agents, and can prevent emotional spirals. We
demonstrate our model with a sample scenario, and show the effects of
having multiple channels and emotional masking on the overall emotional
contagion for several groups of agents.